For almost 20 years, Heike Baranowsky has explored the most diverse of urban and natural landscapes, employing novel means and a calm, analytical, perspective. On the occasion of her 6th solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss the artist shows three new works under the title KviKvi, which draw upon Icelandic nature.

The Icelandic landscape at the foot of the Eyjafjallajökull vulcano, responsible for the near standstill of European aviation in 2010, as well as a 100-year old, brick-built pool built into the rock, form the stage for KviKvi, 2014. Ten women singing together in a choir left their daily routine behind for a week in July 2014 to develop a project together with the artists Heike Baranowsky and Ursula Rogg, and choirmaster Gróa Hreinsdottir. The only predetermined detail was that there would be singing, and the singing would take place within the pool. KviKvi, a traditional Icelandic lullaby, served as the point of departure and as the basis for a range of improvisations in movements and singing which took place during those seven days. Collage-like performance and vocals coalesce with the nature and open into Baranowsky´s extensive, 4-channel video installation.
This singing runs like a thread through the entire piece. Humming and different singing exercises gradually accrue to a musical canon during the course of the film, created by Baranowsky by superimposing and shifting two soundtracks. Finally, the sound unifies in a cacophony.

In Crater (Kerið), 2015, Baranowsky encircled the crater edge of the Kerið volcano, located in southern Iceland, for almost three hours, while taking more than 2000 photographs. These images were subsequently arranged in chronological order, creating a stop-motion effect. Finally, the animation was transferred to 16mm, seamlessly looped and projected upside-down. Shapes are inverted – a concave becomes a convex and vice versa.

Campagne Première is pleased to present Animal with a Language, a multifaceted exhibition by London based artist Oreet Ashery.
Animal with a Language is inspired by Mystery Bouffe, a 1921 play written by Vladimir Mayakovsky for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In Mystery Bouffe, The Unclean build a boat to save themselves from a world-wide flood, The Clean ask to come aboard, but once on board they take over. Reactivating The Clean and The Unclean, Ashery worked collaboratively with community groups* to produce a collection of ponchos and headgear. These humble forms of dress made from cleaning materials are the uniforms of speculative purists and partisans, exploited labourers and heroes. In the exhibition, degraded materials, the political unconscious, languages of exile, restriction and liberation and the salvage of utopian moments interact. Within a flesh toned environment, hypnotic sound, text, videos and assemblages, Ashery’s objects and actors acquire meaning through associative transmission and direct expression. Another character reappearing in the exhibition is the emblem of the pig. In the video titled How to Kill a Pig, a nonchalant woman is waiting for roasting whilst listening to UK animal-slaughter protocols and regulations. In another incarnation the pig is reproduced as a brass reflective snout-print, a ready logotype, titled Paranormal Pig. A tubular image of a human tied into a Hogtie and held together by a delicate magnet, is yet another manifestation. Hogtie is a form of constriction used on animals and humans and as such practised and performed by the police and the army, as well as the porn industries and domestic sexual practices.
Within the troubling global condition of The Un/Clean, Ashery interrogates the paradoxical coexistence of revolt and desire towards the unclean and animalistic, the annihilation of the self and others.

With thanks to waterside contemporary, London.

The World is Flooding was a participatory project culminating in a performance that took place at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern in 2014. Participants in the project included UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, Freedom from Torture community group and Portugal Prints, as well as those arriving individually. The exhibition Animal with a Language brings together elements from Party for Freedom, an Artangel commission, 2013, and The World is Flooding, a Tate Modern commission, 2014.

Oreet Ashery short biography

Ashery (born 1966 in Israel) mines counter-cultures and trash aesthetics in performances, situations, public platforms, photographs, videos, mass-produced and unique artefacts, text and commissioned music. Her expansive and eclectic body of work is made of multilayered projects that reveal ideological, social and gendered paradigms, often through intimate moments of recognition and tend to evolve around minority discourse. Ashery has exhibited and performed extensively at international contexts such as ZKM Karlsruhe, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Brooklyn Museum, Overgaden Copenhagen, DEPO Istanbul, Whitstable Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and Freud Museum. She is currently a visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art.

“There is a correspondence of the minimalist lines in his drawings with the grid structure in architecture, which in time allowed the major American cities to spread out and grow into the sky.”
(Johannes Wohnseifer on Wesley Willis)

Wesley Willis (*1963 - 2003) was an American singer - songwriter and artist from Chicago, who was well known in the underground for his simple but unique music. He wrote humorous, bizarre, and frequently obscene texts and won a large fan community in the 1990s. Aside from his musical solo work, he was also the front man of the punk rock band Wesley Willis Fiasco.
Wesley Willis sketched hundreds of unusual, complicated, coloured ballpoint drawings on paper, most of them showing Chicago street scenes. He sold them in the streets or gave them away to his friends. Later, they appeared on many of his record covers. Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, dominated Willis’s drawings with its impressive skyline as a motif. Almost obsessively, he explored the Dan Ryan Expressway, the congested freeway with its cars and trucks, which connects Chicago’s South Side with the city’s downtown. In Wesley’s work it represents a metaphor for his wish to bridge the two worlds.
After leaving the Wesley Willis Fiasco, Willis’s popularity increased significantly. In 1995, he signed a contract as a solo musician with American Recordings and released two albums. He toured and could be seen frequently on MTV. As a solo artist Willis recorded more than 50 albums with over 20 tracks each. His songs explore themes of daily life such as fast food, bus lines and cultural trends, but also crime and violent confrontations with super heroes. In 2003, the filmmaker Daniel Bitton released a documentary film about Wesley Willis entitled The Daddy of Rock ‘N’ Roll. The documentary shows Willis ‘talking to himself’ and to others, taking the bus, writing a song on a public computer and visiting his friends.
At age of 28, in 1989, Willis began to hear voices, which he described as “demons.” Eventually, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to him, music helped to fight these voices in his head. This theme was picked-up by Die Goldenen Zitronen, with whom Willis toured the United States, in the song “Of Wesley Willis’s Demons.” (Album: Lenin, 2006).
Wesley Willis died on August 21, 2003 at age 40 in Skokie, Illinois, from complications resulting from chronic myeloid leukaemia.Wesley Willis would have turned 52 this year.

Lucas Jardin’s visual language originates in the streets. Using large-scale billboard posters as his primary material, the artist has developed a technique in which he applies solvents onto the ink-jet prints, removing layers of pigment and rubbing away the surface until the original images are rendered unrecognizable. Previously tending more towards abstraction, the works presented in LARSEN⁺ mark a departure from previous experiments through their incorporation of figurative elements. The blurred surfaces of Jardin’s billboard posters reveal loosely connected shapes, words and objects - visual conundrums waiting to be deciphered, creating new fictions of their own.

Deeply entrenched in nature and saturated with the brute force and energy of the natural world, Jean-Sébastien Grégoire’s work conveys a sense of innovation and regeneration. His sculptures appear raw and organic, and are often monumental in scale and in subject - Le Débarquement, shown at the Arsenal in his native city of Montreal, commemorated the events and lives lost in D-Day. For LARSEN⁺, Grégoire continues his investigation into the power of the elemental and the natural, literalising the energy of his frantic search through an exploration of sculptural materiality.

Jean-Sebastien Grégoire was born in Montréal, Canada, where he currently lived and works. He has exhibited with artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Ugo Rondinone, David Altmejd, the Still House Group, Nate Lowman, and Gavin Kenyon. Recent and current exhibitions include ’NEXT’ at Arsenal Montréal (2015) and IDEA Miami with Kowal+Odermatt projects on the occasion of Art Basel Miami (2014). Grégoire was recently commissioned by the City of Montreal to create a monumental public sculpture, which will be completed in 2016.

Hypnotic and immersive: Buetti's new series Flags is a story of art and perception.
The inspiration for these dazzling, luminous colour prints of manipulated national flags came from Buetti's sound installation It’s all in the mind, which was exhibited in 2014 in the Rotunda of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and explores the interweaving of the virtual and physical experience of colour.
The over-saturated colours in Flags increase the intensity of these national symbols beyond recognition. The colour progressions move between lyrical abstraction and colour field painting, immediately capturing the attention of the viewer.
Daniele Buetti became well-known in the 90s with his series Looking for Love, where he distorted and manipulated photographs from the fashion world. Here, however, he moves away from the realm of the picture. With the expansive wall pieces presented in Flags, Buetti creates a space of discovery that heightens the viewers' imagination and alters their perception.

The gallery is very pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Hamburg based artist Patrick Gabler presenting new works from his series “Circle and Cosmos”. The artist will be present at the opening.

The highlights of Gabler’s exhibition are three monumental works: two woodcuts (200 x 140 cm; edition 3, 2014) as well as the ink drawing “Youkobo II” (200 x 136 cm, 2013). Furthermore, two portfolios of drypoint etchings will be exhibited. Given their dimensions (8 x 6 to 18 x 13 cm), these works have the characteristics of miniatures and reveal another aspect of the series.

The attraction between the two poles, Murano and Youkobo, between Italy and Japan, originated Patrick Gabler’s current works. They are inspired both thematically and technically by these two places and recall the swirling Japanese streams or the bubbling clusters of clouds in Baroque Italian landscape drawings. All of the works in the series make reference to the reduced geometric charts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages with their tradition of representing the sky or cosmos in a circular shape.

Patrick Gabler, born in 1967 in Munich, lives and works in Hamburg. As an artist in residence he worked in 2012 at the Venice Printmaking Studio in Venice and in 2013 at the Youkobo Artspace in Tokyo. His drawings have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions and are represented in public collections, such as the Kuperstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen in Berlin and the Achenbach Collection, at the Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco. In 2012 at the gallery Jordan/Seydoux he exhibited two large-format ink drawings from the series “Circle and Cosmos” in a group show with the Dutch artist Henri Jacobs.